Category: The Dish

Rabbi Lapin

Daniel Lapin was one of the most prominent defenders of Mel Gibson from the charge of anti-Semitism during the Kulturkampf moment of the "Passion of the Christ". Check this page out for endless colloquies of support. In an email today from his organization, "Toward Tradition," (I subscribe to lots of lists to see what the right and left are saying among themselves), Lapin told me something I didn’t know:

It is all too easy to join the circling hyenas and denounce Gibson while he is down. On the other hand, though he has provided some financial support to Toward Tradition, I don’t feel obliged to leap to his defense. That is not the purpose behind my writing this column. The purpose of my writing this account is to respond to the question of how recent events have impacted my views of the man and his work. It is also to place a gentle restraining hand upon the shoulder of those in the Jewish community making yet another mistake.

Gibson financed a Jewish organization devoted to defending him? Lapin goes on to attack several Jewish leaders who have dared criticize the anti-Semitism of Gibson and his movie:

Let us address his apology. I have no way of knowing what is in Mel Gibson’s heart but I do know that he has no need to act obsequiously towards Jews or curry favor with us. If Gibson never makes another film he will still be able to buy gas for his Lexus.  He is not a politician trying to win an election after an imprudent remark, like Georgia State Rep. Billy McKinney, who blamed "J-E-W-S" after his daughter, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, was defeated in a congressional primary in 2002.
By the way there was virtually no Jewish criticism of that remark for which there was little apology and which was not made while Billy was drunk. More cynical observers than I suggest it might have something to do with the McKinneys being Democrats.

The premature lurch toward attacking the real enemy – the Democrats – is too obvious and depressing to register. But here you have a rabbi paid by Gibson to spin for him, and even he has to concede, in an almost beautiful understatement:

As for the remarks Gibson made while intoxicated, ancient Jewish wisdom informs us that one way we can know what a person is really like is by how he behaves when he is drunk. From this we can safely assume that Mel Gibson doesn’t think much of Jews.

Poignant almost.

Not All Were Fooled II

Paula Fredriksen’s TNR review of "The Passion of the Christ" and her account of the politicking ahead of it bears re-reading. Leon Wieseltier also called it like it was:

In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images.

In my forthcoming book, I pondered whether to include Gibson as an exemplar of what’s gone wrong with religious fundamentalism in America. i kept it in. It was a critical moment in the political corruption of Christianity in this country.

Not All Were Fooled I

A reminder that some of the sharpest reviewers saw Gibson’s agenda in "The Passion of the Christ" even as others saw it as a political opportunity for the Christianist wing of the Republican party:

We soon see the human agents of his distress in a cutaway shot of Judas meeting with the Sanhedrin, the rabbis and Pharisees who oversee the Jerusalem temple and convey in their every act and utterance the sort of unfeeling villainy you would see in a Punch and Judy landlord. They also, not incidentally, lock firmly into the caricature of Jewish venality and cunning for which Passion plays have been infamous ever since the Middle Ages. The most subtle anti-Semitic trope in the portrayal of the Sanhedrin is also the most telling: the high priest, Caiaphas, is almost never pictured alone. The entire Sanhedrin, in fact, moves continually in a pack – you imagine that they have to navigate through doors sideways – and this casual thronging instinct, together with their boxy period headwear and white prayer shawls, gives the impression that they are ancient Hebrew forerunners of the imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars. As in George Lucas’s cinematic spiritual fables, the effect here is to depict a grouped set of evil impulses rather than identifiable individuals.

I see also that a friend of Gibson is claiming that Gibson could not remember his anti-semitic tirades because of an "alcoholic blackout". At 0.12?

Medved’s Response

Thanks for alerting me to it. Make your own mind up. Money quote:

Rather than driving this tormented, self-destructive, deeply disturbed but vastly talented artist into the arms of active Jew-haters (like his father), wouldn’t it make more sense to try to reach out to him at a moment of vulnerability and disgrace? The Jewish community need not approach the tarnished star with a message of "poor baby, all is forgiven" but it makes sense to offer at least some ladder to help him crawl out of the dank pit he has dug for himself. At a time when Israel finds herself isolated as never before, imagine the impact of Gibson announcing a supportive trip to Jerusalem in the company of selected Jewish leaders – with a reverent, remorseful stop at Auschwitz on the way.

How about asking him to renounce the views of his father on the Holocaust first?